This website presents a listing, in
four alphabetically arranged subsets, of some 21,000 persons who are known or who are
strongly suspected to have been buried in Colorado County, Texas. It also
provides information on the more than 130 cemeteries or burial sites which
have been located in the county.

Though every effort has been made to
ensure the accuracy of the information presented, this website should not
be used as a primary source. Rather, it should be used as an index to
direct researchers to the cemetery itself or to concomitant sources. It is
axiomatic that in compiling data of this volume, amateurs such as
ourselves, under pressure of time and burdened by constant interruptions,
will make errors..

The Nesbitt Memorial Library began
actively cataloguing and surveying the county's cemeteries in 1987. The
library used earlier surveys, taken by various persons, as a base, but
often, as was felt necessary, verified their accuracy and augmented them
with additional on-site surveys.

The library's surveys only began with
the transcription of the tombstones on the site. Afterward, the surveys
were supplemented and expanded, with family and biographical data and, in
some cases, full names and dates being extracted or inferred from other
sources, including newspapers, courthouse records, church records, funeral
home records, census records, etc. Often such records provided the names
of persons who have no tombstones. Accordingly, though the great majority
of persons listed on this website do have marked graves, the researcher
should not be alarmed or convinced that thieves have been at work if he or
she cannot locate a tombstone for a particular person on the site.

No attempt has been made to reproduce
inscriptions on the stones absolutely. Many inscriptions have been
amplified, for instance, in many cases, a person's full name, and/or the
full dates of his birth and death, has been included in these records
though it does not appear on his/her tombstone.

A major problem with compiling surveys
of active cemeteries is, of course, keeping them up to date. It is
impractical to resurvey every cemetery every year or two simply to record
new burials. Rather than go to that length, since it began this project,
the library has dutifully entered data from obituaries published in each
of the four Colorado County newspapers into its cemetery record data base.
However, it is evident that obituaries are not printed for every person
buried in the county, and accordingly, we have certainly missed some
recent burials.

In some instances, information taken
from one source differed from that taken from another. Because our format
(and common sense) restricts us to only one date of death, one date of
birth, one set of parents, etc., to resolve conflicts between the records,
we have established a hierarchy among them. We regarded information
contained in the official county records at the courthouse as the most
reliable, followed by church records, funeral home records, newspaper
obituaries, tombstone inscriptions, and reliable personal affidavits. Be
warned however that we have not checked each of these types of records for
every individual contained on this website.

We have also included information on
persons whose exact burial site is unknown, but who are believed to have
been buried somewhere in Colorado County. In most cases, what little is
known of these persons has been extracted from newspaper obituaries.
Library staff and volunteers (notably Elizabeth Schoellmann and Dorothy
Albrecht) have combed through every known extant issue of every known
Colorado County newspaper for such information.

The library previously published, in
very small editions, two collections of its cemetery records. Volume 1,
which was published in 1992, covered only the southwest portion of the
county. Volume 2, which was produced in 1993, covered the Columbus area.
This website covers the entire county and completely supersedes the
previously published books.